Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I don't need to add any more to the other reviews which embrace this film as it needs to be. What is interesting to me is why it is rarely seen any more? I've seen it exactly once when it was first released and never since. But it left an indelible impression and I've yet to find it on DVD. And now I read that Hollywood tried to suppress publication of the West novella. Is it possible that you never see it on tv because HollyRock doesn't want it seen?

I could not watch this on a double bill with 'They Shoot Horses Don't They' even if they do belong together. I'd be wiped out for a week. Both films strip away the California veneer of nostalgia (whether movies or dance marathons) that embalms the depression horrors beneath. Both films are sizzling with great acting, great and memorable set pieces, outrageous and unmitigated despair. Burgess Meredith gave his greatest performance in this film and was nominated for it. Karen Black never looked better or acted better and Donald Sutherland bravely went to the limits with his Homer character. The brat's song making fun of his 'pop eyes' was very brave of him - he had always been self conscious of this feature of his and the rage must have been easy to access! This and 'Horses' were both films by two grim writers who were only 'filmable' in the dark era of the 70's. In this way, both films are both period pieces of the thirties AND the seventies.

John Schlesinger's film of Nathanial West's iconic novel Day of the Locust has been hanging in there with film buffs for so long I think it is about time it was acknowledged as the minor masterpiece that it is. Maybe not so minor in fact. When I watch it, which I've been doing since the day it was released, I find myself wishing Hitchcock or Welles had directed an adaptation of it, something that would have insured its arrival into the pantheon of masterpieces. This isn't to degrade Schlesinger's work at all but I think the Hitchock or Wellesian touch might have made it into a film as much talked about as Sunset Boulevard. Day of the Locust is not simply another Hollywood exposé along the lines of Sunset Boulevard, A Star is Born and The Bad and the Beautiful, but it is every bit as fascinating and gut wrenching, perhaps more so, than those classics. Nathanial West's tale is a full blown horror story. Hollywood itself is the inanimate monster that evokes the beast in the bedazzled humans that inhabit the landscape. ALL are victims of the mind numbing, soul evaporating environment. The ironic and disheartening thing about this story is that West has used Love as the vehicle that speeds its passengers towards their melancholy doom. The most sympathetic character is Homer Simpson, yes, Homer Simpson, played with a quiet and tortured passion by Donald Sutherland. Homer is a meek, virginal certified public account who fate has thrown in the path of Faye Greener (Karen Black) and her down-at-heel father Harry (Burgess Meredith in a terrifying performance of pathos and madness), an ex- vaudevillian who has ended up in Hollywood after arriving their years before for a small part in a B movie. Tod (William Atherton) is a bright young man newly arrived from Yale. He is a gifted artist and spends his time recording in drawings the people and events he witnesses. He is rapidly sucked into the vortex of despair and barely escapes with his life in the end. Homer, on the other hand, is not so lucky. The final scenes are harrowing. The most shocking effect it had on me is that I found myself rooting for the crazed Homer who does something I can't bring myself to reveal because the shock of it is worth discovering for oneself. It involves the comeuppance of a horrid child actor named Adore (its sex is ambiguous) played with infuriating moxie by the young Jackie Haley.The cast is splendid. Geraldine Page makes an atomic blast of an appearance as the charlatan evangelist Aimee Sempel McPherson in a single scene of insane religious hysteria.Day of the Locust is about our atavistic need for gods and the subsequent need to destroy them for not living up to our delusions of ourselves. It is a truly disturbing and fascinating film and should be seen by all lovers of great film adaptations of great booksThe 1970s and early 1980s were a Golden Age in Hollywood that is just now being acknowledged as such. The Day of the Locust is one film from that era that rests comfortably near the top of the pyramid. Don't miss it.Very highly recommended.

I saw this movie, at a cinema, when it was released. I came away from it, horrified and subdued. Now, thirty-five years later, my assessment hasn't change: this is one of the most horrific stories ever to hit the screen and, in my opinion, vies with Mulholland Drive (2001) as the definitive statement about Hollywood - the Dream Factory as someone once said.What makes this story all the more horrible is that some of the fictional characters were based upon real people. Hence, one can only speculate the extent to which some events have a basis in fact.The story, published in 1939 from the mind of Nathanael West (ex-Hollywood screen writer), pulls no punches about the trials of Faye Greener (Karen Black, in her finest role, as a green-horn actress) to claw her way into the glitzy world of Hollywood, showing in vivid detail how would-be stars – both sexes – prostitute themselves, literally and figuratively, in their bids for stardom. In sum, the story is about how people sell themselves, and not only in the business of making movies. To that extent, it's also a modern metaphor for all the stories about how all of humanity sells itself to the devil of money everyday, in order to survive.The difference with the rest of humanity, of course, is that we can keep our sins private.So into this mix of horror enters naïve Tod Hackett (William Atherton) as an aspiring art director to a Hollywood mogul. He lives in the same apartment block as Faye and is smitten; but he makes no headway, because she's on the make for somebody to make her a star. So Tod – arguably West's alter ego for the story – is reduced to being an observer to all that transpires between Faye and all those she encounters. One of whom is Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), a mild-mannered bachelor and accountant who just likes to mind his own business; in today's psychological parlance, he'd be labeled as extreme passive-aggressive personality type. So, like Tod, he's also bowled over one day when he meets Faye through his association with Faye's father, Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith, in his finest role), a has-been vaudevillian who does old tricks as he goes about as a door-to-salesman, in the Hollywood hills, a pathetic caricature of what all actors must do to survive.And, like the passing parade that begins the story, the viewer, with Tod, goes on to meet a succession of unsavory dead beats, in high and low society, who pull and push at poor Faye to do their bidding, all with the promise of rich dreams and dreams of riches. Faye is a lost soul, however, devoured by desires she can't stop or ignore: but she can do what it takes – she can hack it. But can Tod? Well, yes and no, as the viewer learns.For my money, the most unsavory of all characters, and stunningly played, is the child actor Adore (Jack Earle Haley) who continually torments Homer at and near his home, and who meets Homer for the last time at a back street, off Vine, where a Hollywood premier opening is, ironically, the last major scene in this movie. Anybody who sees this movie will forever remember that scene between Homer and Adore. Not to be forgotten also is Adore's utterly obnoxious and evil mother, played by Gloria LeRoy (I think).But it is the transformation of Homer in that back street – infatuated with Faye and tormented by his inhibitions laid bare by a child – that is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of acting ever. Why Donald Sutherland didn't get even a nomination is beyond belief.(As an aside, I can't help wondering whether the developers of the long-running TV cartoon of The Simpsons used the name Homer Simpson as some kind of back-handed reference to Locust.) The mise en scene, photography and soundtrack are exemplary. The direction by Schlesinger is so astute, it's invisible to this viewer. And the script faithfully follows the story to the last line of the novel; the only significant exception is the omission of the back story about Homer, before he came to Hollywood.Has much changed in Hollywood since 1939? Has human nature changed? Whatever your opinion, do see also Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch's take on the same basic story: young girl wants to be in pictures and gets what she wants – or does she?If Locust sucks you in, Drive will swallow you whole into an even worse nightmare. Both movies have my highest recommendation. Enjoy.